1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer program product, system, and method for determining a skew error signal (SES) offset used to determine an SES to adjust heads in a drive unit.
2. Description of the Related Art
Advanced magnetic-tape cartridges hold multiple Terabytes (TB) of data, where one Terabyte equals 1000 Gigabytes and one Gigabyte equals 1000 Megabytes. The recording densities necessary to achieve this capacity require that the read head elements have nearly or identically the width of the write head elements. Problems can arise in such high density magnetic tape cartridges if the tape medium becomes skewed due to heat or density, which can cause the read heads to read off-track during the write-verify, and this misregistration resulting in either write-verify errors or the inability to write-verify altogether. The write-verify process is actually the reading of the freshly written data during the actual write process.
Servo patterns may be used to determine an extent of misregistration, or the extent to which a read head is reading off the track. Misregistration may result when there is a skew arising from when the head does not remain perfectly perpendicular relative to the direction in which the tape moves. Misregistration can also occur when the write and read heads on a head unit have an offset. These misregistrations prevent the read element on a read head from reading on-track data written by a corresponding write element on the write head.
In timing-based servo (TBS) systems, recorded servo patterns consist of magnetic transitions with two different azimuthal slopes. Head position is derived from the relative timing of pulses, or dibits, generated by a narrow head reading the servo patterns. TBS patterns also allow the encoding of additional longitudinal position (LPOS) information without affecting the generation of the transversal position error signal (PES). This is obtained by shifting transitions from their nominal pattern position using pulse-position modulation (PPM).
A servo controller of a tape drive calculates a skew to generate a skew error signal (SES) used to adjust the skew of the tape heads with respect to the tape media. The servo controller may measure a difference in times when the servo pattern is read by an upper and lower servo read elements on the same head. An angle of the skew may be determined by calculating an arctangent of the difference of the times of the read servo pattern by a distance between the servo bands or servo read elements on the same head. This skew angle is then used to adjust the heads to prevent misregistration.
There is a need in the art for improved techniques to determine the skew used to adjust the heads to avoid misregistration errors.